Mission Creep Causes Amnesty International to Lose Focus

Noting that “charities have their bureaucratic imperatives to grow, and they do so by moral imperialism”, Dalrymple finds two recent indications that Amnesty International has lost their bearings, and he attributes it to a phenomenon he cites often (but which perhaps needs a better name):

It is as if Amnesty grew bored with its original purpose and now seems to suffer from what one might call the not-a-sparrow-falls-but-it-is-our-moral-concern syndrome, itself a result of believing that virtue is proportionate to the number of good causes that one espouses. Therefore, one must spread one’s moral wings and fly off into the ethical stratosphere.

He described this idea in a speech in Australia as one in which (quoting from memory), “moral concern increases in proportion to the square of the distance of the problem from oneself.”